Tuesday's Child
October 12, 2014 1:17 PM   Subscribe

Five year old Iris Grace has taken up painting. Iris is autistic, and her parents introduced her to painting as a means to help with her speech therapy. She has attracted attention worldwide and her paintings have sold quite well. Iris in action. Originals, prints, and calendars can be purchased here. Iris has a constant companion, her name is Thula. The homepage of irisgracepainting.com.
posted by cwest (28 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is incredible, thanks for posting.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:24 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


I have a baby girl and a much beloved cat and I can only hope that they show one tenth of the affection for each other that Thula and Iris obviously share. Sniffle.
posted by lydhre at 1:27 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


I love these stories about autistic kids and their therapy animals. Doesn't work for every kid, but when it does it is really amazing.
posted by sbutler at 1:59 PM on October 12, 2014


"Raining Cats" is amazing (look at it for a second).
posted by dhens at 2:24 PM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


She really loves blue-greens!
posted by Omnomnom at 2:44 PM on October 12, 2014


Raining Cats, alright, but I doubt I would have seen it w/o your prompt, dhens.
posted by jamjam at 3:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Big deal - my thirty year old could do that!
posted by thelonius at 4:35 PM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


woooooowwwww!!!
posted by divabat at 4:42 PM on October 12, 2014


That is the best cat.
posted by lollusc at 4:44 PM on October 12, 2014 [8 favorites]


Usually I'm not big on the next big "child" artist thing, and I'd never call anything a 5 year old does a "masterpiece" because that's impossible, but I'll be damned if those paintings are not pretty incredible and well-composed.
posted by Think_Long at 6:09 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Wow! Iris is just amazing. Genuinely so.

And the stuff going on in her paintings has to be intentional. Nobody has happy accidents like that.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:13 PM on October 12, 2014


My mind is just totally blown by those paintings.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:28 PM on October 12, 2014


And the stuff going on in her paintings has to be intentional. Nobody has happy accidents like that.

Exactly. I am calling BS on the whole thing. The video shows no advanced technique like the final watercolors. The drip lines and the voids in particular...you can't just slop down paint and have a field of voids. That takes planning and I doubt a five year old is going to understand the technique. Cute story though.
posted by Benway at 7:40 PM on October 12, 2014 [4 favorites]


Holy damn those are good. Thanks for posting.
posted by hypersloth at 7:48 PM on October 12, 2014


Whatever one thinks of the paintings, can we all agree that Thula is delightful? (Yes, yes we can.)
posted by Lexica at 8:16 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


None of you believe she's painting those right? Right?
posted by nzero at 8:44 PM on October 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I find myself skeptical of the backstory, but the images are genuinely lovely. One thing I was looking for in the main post was candid video of Iris painting, and it turns out the parents have uploaded a few examples, but of course they're only showing 3 or 4 minutes of work at a time.
posted by brookedel at 8:50 PM on October 12, 2014


She sure can fill up a canvas.
posted by egypturnash at 9:06 PM on October 12, 2014


It's a Maine Coon right? Cat did the paintings.
posted by Divine_Wino at 9:08 PM on October 12, 2014 [7 favorites]


To be clear, I'm not saying that Iris isn't the artist of the paintings. I'm just saying that they represent something and have meaning. They aren't random splotches of color on a canvas.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:07 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


Little girl lives in her special world,
with her cat.
Beauty flows into her paintings.

This is so far into aawww that I may not recover.
posted by mule98J at 10:31 PM on October 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm not saying that Iris isn't the artist of the paintings

I'll bite the bullet and say that Iris isn't the only artist of the painting then. Which is kind of sad because I'd love to see an artist of that age make irregular and regular straight lines like that, or make color compositions of that size, or make registers that cross the page and look balanced and natural, or make decisions about what areas to work in what way. Hell, I'd love to be able to do those with ease and my arm span has got to be twice hers.

So yeah, decision making and hand-eye coordination, the hard part of most paintings. But that's not what I've seen in any of the videos so... ugh. It feels icky.
posted by tychotesla at 10:41 PM on October 12, 2014 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I feel terrible but I'm not buying it. The close-ups of Iris painting show the sort of paintings a (talented!) 5-year-old would make. Same with the candid videos brookedel linked above. They don't show nearly the level of technical skill as the gallery paintings.

I don't think Iris has the muscular control for all of those evenly spaced straight lines and dots in the final works. (Neither do I!)

I'm hoping a talented parent/friend is just "finishing" the paintings for her, in which case it would be an awesome collaboration and I'd be impressed. But I wish they were honest.

Iris is adorable and charming and I'd love to see a documentary of her life and her struggles and her triumphs and her cat. But there's some fiction happening here.
posted by mmoncur at 4:39 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


dhens: ""Raining Cats" is amazing (look at it for a second)."

Holy Cr@p!

Thank you for making me take a second look at this. Apparently, knowing the name of a work sometimes does make a difference.
posted by arkham_inmate_0801 at 6:28 AM on October 13, 2014


Yeah, the paintings in the videos look very much like what my 4 year old paints. I would like to believe this but there is probably someone else contributing. The only way this is plausible to me is if her style of movement changes midway through a painting. Which is possible, but it's not what they've chosen to document in the video clips.
posted by waterlily at 7:15 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


Unless she goes into a trance like Isaac Mendez from Heroes when she does those paintings there's no way that kid made them. She just doesn't have the eye-hand coordination or the focused attention to create a negative space image in the midst of a series of expertly drawn vertical lines. Cute kid, I'm glad she gets to express herself despite her autism. But she's not the artist here, sorry.
posted by scalefree at 8:47 AM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


No relation, actually. But thank you for posting!
posted by tuesdayschild at 1:34 PM on October 13, 2014


I'm always confounded by this sort of thing. On its face, with no evidence at all one way or another, it's hard to guess at the truth because a) it's a very big world and the very unlikely is sometimes also the very notable, but b) that also applies to motives and means to get away with fraud. I find that people are generally too reflexively skeptical about this sort of thing because they don't account for (a).

However, in this particular case, I was very interested in the scenes in the video showing Iris painting. To my utterly ignorant eye, she didn't demonstrate the motor control that seemed necessary to produce those paintings. I'm keenly interested to hear that people with actual knowledge and experience share this judgment.

What I do find possible is that she could have an eye and motivation to produce such works, provided the motor skills, even at her age. I am strongly disinclined to be skeptical on the basis of a presumption that she couldn't have such a talent -- again, it's a very large world and there's a long history of amazing prodigies. And I'd really like to believe that Iris is such an artist.

Although the more learned opinions above are very suggestive, I'm not willing to find them conclusive. What little we see of Iris painting in the videos is a very small amount of information from which to make a strong conclusion.

But assuming that she's not the primary artist, this really sort of pisses me off. Aside from how this is relevant to any of these paintings being sold, it's really not fair to other autistic kids, even if the parents believe that ultimately somehow this is all benefiting a good cause. Because autistic children are sometimes amazing artistic prodigies and dishonesty about one leads to suspicion of all; not to mention that it's also not fair to Iris herself.

Still, maybe this is genuine. I'd prefer that.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:29 PM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]


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